The Murders of Indigenous Women in Canada as Feminicides: Toward a Decolonial Intersectional Reconceptualization of Femicide

In this article, I focus on the murders of over six hundred Indigenous women in Canada to argue that the radical feminist concept of femicide is limited in its capacity to help us analyze the killing of women as a product of intersecting structures of inequality and colonial histories. These murders constitute racialized gendered violence rooted in the ongoing material and discursive effects of colonial power relations and require a conceptualization of femicide that views gender as a necessary but not definitive condition. To reconceptualize femicide, I first develop a decolonial intersectional framework that draws on feminist scholarship on coloniality and intersectionality, highlighting their shared understanding of gender and race as relational and mutually constitutive, a framework that is itself premised on a critique of dichotomous categorical thinking. This framework further integrates the insights of two alternative perspectives to femicide: the Mexican and Latin American(ist) adaptations of femicide as feminicidio and feminicide respectively, and the anticolonial approach to femicide that has been used to study the “honor killings” of Palestinian women. While feminicidio and feminicide move toward an intersectional analysis that highlights the complicity of the state in gender violence, the anticolonial approach theorizes the relationship between colonial dynamics and the killing of women. In applying this framework through empirical analysis of the murders of Indigenous women in Canada, I extend the Latin American(ist) perspective to argue that these crimes can be understood as feminicides. Although I do not intend to impose this frame on Indigenous women who have mobilized against this violence, I propose that it could have implications both for Indigenous women’s activism in the Canadian context and for fostering transnational feminist dialogues on the killing of women that attend to colonial modernity and the intersection of multiple structures of inequality.